Sacrilege: A Novel

by S. J. Parris

  “Yes, indeed. And it would surely cast doubt on the competence of whoever is responsible for the security of the treasury,” I said pleasantly. “But why do you suppose I have anything to do with it?”

  “Tom Garth says he saw you abroad in the precincts last night. Don’t play games with me,” Langworth hissed, through his teeth. “You are already charged with murder and will be charged with attempted murder too. Nicholas Kingsley has told me how you tried to kill him and leave him for dead when he caught you attempting to steal from his father’s cellar.” Satisfied with the effect of this barb, he swung his warning finger around to include Harry. “Either you let me search your house now, Robinson, or I shall come back with armed men and a warrant from the constable, and then we shall see what we find. Eh?”

  His voice was so brittle as he spoke that the veins at his temples stood out like cords against his pale skin, and he looked for all the world like a man straining at his closestool, so much so that I could not stifle a laugh in time. Langworth’s throat—what could be seen of it—mottled with fury and the flush spread up over his gaunt cheeks until his eyes bulged and it seemed his head might explode. He swept his robe around him with a practised gesture and turned on his heel.

  “By God you will pay for that laughter. You will all pay,” he said, jabbing the pointing finger at my face as he stalked away towards the cathedral like the Devil in a masque delivering his final ominous curse.

  A peal of bells clanged out from the bell tower behind us, making me start. Harry watched Langworth’s retreating back and slumped forward over his stick, as if the breath had been knocked out of him.

  “By God, I’m paying for it already, Bruno,” he muttered. “Sometimes I can’t help thinking he has sent you here to test my faith.”

  “God?”

  “Walsingham.” He looked at me darkly, then glanced up at the top storey of his house. “He is serious, you know.” He jerked his head in Langworth’s direction. “Whatever you took from him, he wants it back and he will get his warrant and his men-at-arms and return to search the place. If she is found, we’ll all be hanged.” He scratched a hand across his silver stubble. “You and I must attend Holy Communion now. As must Langworth—at least we can keep an eye on him. I will lock the house soundly and when we come out we had better put her somewhere more convenient. And I am still not shaved—once again I must face the dean looking like a tramp.” He turned back to me. “And where’s my bloody breakfast? You are without doubt the worst servant I have ever had under my roof.”

  I acknowledged this with a weary grin, realising that I had left the bread at the Widow Gray’s house.

  “You will have your reward some day, Harry, I promise.”

  “Huh. In heaven, perhaps. Now, go up quickly and tell her not to stir a muscle. I wouldn’t put it past that dog to have someone break in and turn the place upside down while we are at prayer.” His eyes narrowed as he looked back towards the cathedral.

  I pushed my hands through my hair and cast my eyes up to the bell tower. Where the Devil was I supposed to put Sophia—and the book—out of Langworth’s reach for the next few hours?

  I found her slumped on the truckle bed, dressed in clothes of mine that she had evidently pulled out from my travelling bag and reading my old battered copy of Copernicus, the one I had carried halfway across Europe. She sat up when she saw me and there was something wary about her smile, as if she feared she would be reprimanded. The shirt was too broad for her across the shoulders and she had laced it only loosely; as she moved it slipped down, revealing one shoulder and the curve of her collarbone. I swallowed. She had not bound her breasts either and the small pointed shape of them was visible through the thin linen. I walked across the room to the window so that she would not see how badly I wanted to push her down on the mattress and tear it from her.

  “My last clean shirt,” I said softly, still not looking at her.

  “Sorry. I had to take off those hideous skirts Madame Fleury dressed me in last night. They belonged to Olivier’s grandmother, apparently. They smell like she died in them.”

  I laughed and came to sit on the end of the bed, watching her. She returned my gaze steadily but I could not be sure what I read there.

  “How do you like Copernicus?” I indicated the book. “I’m afraid you will find no magic spells in those pages.”

  The corner of her mouth twisted into a wry smile.

  “I don’t suppose even you would be so bold or so foolish as to carry books of magic about the country, Bruno,” she said. There was a hint of sadness in her smile. “Though God knows we could do with a magic spell at the moment.”

  “Even more so now,” I said, and told her of Langworth’s intention to return with armed men to search the house. She put her face in her hands and sank back against the wall. I took it for crying and leaned closer to rest a hand on her arm, but she lowered her hands and looked at me with the blankness of exhaustion.

  “Is he looking for me? Or that book you are carrying about with you as if it were a newborn infant?”

  “I don’t think he saw you last night. Not clearly enough to recognise you, anyway, or he would have made reference to it as a threat, I’m sure of it. But he knows I have the book and he can’t tell the constable what he’s really searching for. I would not put it past him to contrive that a purse of money from the treasury should be found here too—that would as good as seal my sentence. Christ!” I ran a hand through my hair and thumped my fist into the mattress. “He means to finish me off one way or another. How did I not see the danger?”

  Sophia crept forward and gently laid her forehead against my shoulder, her hand on my thigh.

  “I am so sorry, Bruno. I had no idea it would be so tangled. Becket, the dead boys—I knew nothing of any of it. I thought it would be a simple matter of proving that Nicholas Kingsley did it so that I could be free. I believed he did. I never imagined you would end up—”

  She left the words unspoken.

  “The fault is mine. I should have seen the danger.”

  “But then, would you still have come?”

  “Probably.”

  She looked up at me, eyes wide.

  “Why?”

  “You know why, Sophia.”

  She said nothing, only continued to look at me expectantly with that unreadable expression. Did she need to hear me say aloud that I loved her? The words were poised on my tongue, but some unexplained instinct held them back. Instead I reached for her hand and she twined her fingers with mine, but it seemed more a gesture of sorrow. We were both under sentence of death now, unless a miracle happened, and even Thomas Becket was unlikely to deliver one of those.

  Something, some phrase I had heard that morning chafed at my mind, as if I had missed a vital part of the picture, but when I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate to recall what it might have been, I was distracted by a great shuddering sob from Sophia that racked her thin body as she leant into me, a sob that seemed to contain all the frustration and rage of the past year. I held her while she vented her pain, her face pressed to my shoulder, my cheek leaning against her hair, but although she clung to me like a child with night terrors, I sensed with a growing hollowness in my chest that after the heightened excitement of the night before, I had passed back into my previous role of reassuring friend, a part I hoped I had left behind. I kissed her hair softly. Well, I could be patient. At this moment we were both in dire need of a friend.

  Chapter 16

  The morning service passed, interminably slowly. All through the singing of the choir, the reading of the Gospel, and the monotone of the dean’s sermon, none of which I heard, Langworth glared across the carved stalls at me and Harry with a very unchristian light in his eyes, as if he hoped to wither us beneath his stare like a basilisk. Sun slanted through the high windows and lit the columns and the floor with geometric shapes in jewel colours. When I could tear my gaze away from Langworth’s I looked up to those windows, where glass undimmed by cen
turies of sunlight depicted the miracles of Saint Thomas, the procession of pilgrims to the shrine, their hands thrown up in simple joy as the saint’s bones give them back their sight, or their legs, or their children from the grave. Had they really thought, Langworth and his friends, that they could stage a miracle? Did they imagine people would believe in it? But why should they doubt it, I thought, recalling the trade in relics in my own country, the commerce of priests offering a touch of a weeping statue of the virgin for the chink of coins in their pockets, a statue they had engineered themselves to dispense tears at the appropriate time. For nearly four hundred years people had believed in the truth of the stories told in the windows above us in the cathedral, and they would want to believe again.

  When the dean eventually pronounced the final blessing, I took Harry’s keys and tried to press my way out quickly ahead of him, leaving him to watch Langworth’s movements. The treasurer’s eyes followed me as I left, but he had been detained by the dean.

  I nodded a brisk farewell to them both as I passed, and heard Dean Rogers saying, “No sign of Doctor Sykes this morning, John? I think we can forgive his absence in the light of his tireless devotion to the health of our town …”

  I pushed through the congregation out into the precincts and rushed to the gatehouse. Tom Garth’s look of dismay told me immediately that Langworth’s words were true.

  “You gave me your oath, Tom,” I said in a low voice, forcing my way into his small lodge.

  He held his hands up as if in self-defence.

  “He threatened me, sir. He said he knew you had been abroad in the precincts last night and I would be expected to say I’d seen you to the constable. He said if I lied I would lose my place.” He leaned in closer. “But I never said a word about Mistress Kingsley, I swear it.”

  “But you will, if he threatens you again?”

  He shook his head vehemently.

  “No, sir—that was my promise. I reasoned if he knew about you already I couldn’t very well deny it without bringing myself trouble. But I won’t mention a word about her. And you won’t say anything about the gloves—?”

  His eyes were full of fear. I sighed.

  “No. But I need your help, Tom. Langworth wants to search Harry Robinson’s house—I need to put her somewhere else, just for this afternoon. Is there anywhere—an outbuilding, a shed, any place he wouldn’t think to look, that we can get her to easily?”

  He considered for a moment and nodded.

  “There’s an outbuilding behind the conduit house, the one that stands between here and Doctor Robinson’s house. It was used for storage, but there’s nothing much there now. I have the key—I reckon she’d be safe in there for a few hours.”

  “Excellent. When the crowds have finished milling around, come and find me at Harry’s. We have to move quickly—Langworth will not want to waste time. He’s probably on his way to fetch the constable even now.”

  I returned to the house. Harry arrived a few minutes later, confirming that he had seen Langworth heading in the direction of one of the side gates. I bounded up the stairs to see Sophia bundled again in the clothes of Olivier’s dead grandmother.

  “They will find me this time for sure,” she said, her voice flat.

  “Come now—where is your spirit?” I said, more cheerfully than I felt. “This is only until Langworth has satisfied himself with ransacking the house.”

  At the foot of the stairs she came face-to-face with Harry for the first time. He gave a stiff little bow; she offered a shy smile in return. I watched her with interest; she has a way with men, I thought. All that fierce independence of spirit that I love in her—she knows how to suppress it when she senses modesty is required. She can lower her gaze and look demure with the best of them, but that expression hides a steeliness of purpose you might never guess at, unless you caught the flash of her amber eyes from under those lashes.

  “I owe you a great debt, Doctor Robinson,” she was saying, and Harry had taken her hand in his. “If we all get through this, I shall try to find some way of repaying your kindness, if it takes me the rest of my life.”

  “Well, I doubt I’ll be around for much of that,” Harry chuckled. “But do not talk of debts, Mistress Kingsley. There has been great wrong done here, in this holy place, and we must rely on Doctor Bruno to put it right, with God’s help.”

  “I would trust Doctor Bruno with my life,” she said, with unexpected feeling. As she spoke, she met my eye with a smile and my anxieties almost melted away.

  Tom arrived, good as his word, and when we were certain that there was no one about on the path to see us, he and I bundled Sophia between us close to the boundary wall of the cathedral and along as far as the conduit house. The outbuilding was added onto the back wall; its roof was threadbare in patches and was clearly used by gulls as a roost, judging by the quantity of guano spattered over the remaining tiles and the walls. The door was not especially sturdy but was secured by a rusting iron padlock, which Tom unlocked from a key on his belt. Inside the place smelled of mould. A decayed gardening implement leaned against one wall, and the remains of some sacking lay rotting in a corner.

  “Never say that I do not take you to the finest places,” I murmured, as Sophia reluctantly stepped inside while Tom cast his eye over the grounds to make sure no one came. A brief smile flickered over her face, but quickly faded as she stood in the middle of the shed, wrapping her arms around herself, unsure of whether to sit.

  “I have to lock you in,” I whispered, apologetically. “Just in case.”

  “I know. Bruno?” she said, in a small voice. “Don’t be too long, will you?”

  “I will be back as soon as Langworth has finished poking around,” I promised. “Here.” I lifted the leather satchel from my shoulder and handed it to her. “He must not find the book either. Keep it safe for me.”

  “One day, will you tell me what is in it?”

  “Perhaps. When I have worked that out for myself. For now, your only task is to keep still and silent.”

  “Oh, I am good at that,” she said, with a sardonic flash of her eyes. “It is what women are taught to do all our lives.”

  “Well, now your life depends on it,” I said, and closed the door on her.

  Tom secured the padlock and gave me the key from his belt.

  “Return it to me when you need to. And be assured, sir, my lips are sealed.”

  “Thank you.” I hesitated. “Tom—if it comes to it, would you be willing to testify about the gloves? To say they never belonged to Mistress Kingsley?”

  His large frame visibly trembled.

  “I would be punished, would I not?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “As long as the killer is brought to justice, it would be clear you only acted to protect yourself. You might hope for clemency.”

  Tom narrowed his eyes.

  “But you can’t promise the killer will be brought to justice, can you? And I might not get clemency.”

  “The only evidence against Mistress Kingsley is that pair of gloves. Until you tell the truth, they could still hang her.”

  “I will give it some thought,” he grunted, and walked away towards the gatehouse.

  No one in this town has any faith in the law, I thought. I am the only fool here who thinks truth has a chance. A gull landed on the roof of the outbuilding and looked at me enquiringly with its yellow eye, its head tilted to one side. I prayed it would not shit through the holes on to my book, which I had no doubt Sophia was puzzling over even now.

  When I returned to the house I found Harry shuffling about the kitchen at the back, peering into cupboards, lifting the lid on pots.

  “Well, Harry. If you have anything hidden away in this house that you wouldn’t want Langworth to see, now would be the time to dispose of it. Letters, for instance.”

  “I burn all Walsingham’s letters. I’m not a fool. Tell you what—they won’t find anything in this godforsaken kitchen, that’s for certain,”
he grumbled, poking an iron spoon into the cauldron suspended above the empty grate to make his point.

  “Yes, I hear you, there is no food here,” I snapped, exasperated. “Looking in every pot won’t change that.”

  “And whose fault is that?” he shot back. “Who sent my servant out of town and promised to take his place? God knows I am Her Majesty’s loyal servant, but this mire you have dragged me into is not the crown’s business, it is all for the sake of your doxy!”

  “Not the crown’s business? That you have sat by while a viper’s nest of traitors keeps guard over forbidden relics and plots to revive the greatest saint’s cult in England, as a direct rebellion against the queen? Is that not her minister’s business?”

  “Keep your voice down, can’t you?”

  We glared at each other for a long moment, until my anger subsided first and I looked at the floor.

  “I’m sorry. I have asked a lot of you, I know. But we are on the same side, Harry.”

  He pushed a hand through the front of his white hair and continued to look at me without speaking, his head to one side as if he were calculating the balance of my faults and my virtues.

  “I have failed Walsingham here,” he said eventually, deflated. “It is I who should be apologising to him. If you had not come and seen what I should have seen long ago, Langworth and Sykes might one day have achieved their aim. And most likely more children would have died along the way.” He sighed and shook his head.

  “The outcome is in the hands of the queen’s justice now,” I said.

  “Let us hope he is competent,” Harry said, in a tone that did not inspire hope. “So many of them can be bought. Still, I will not argue with you, Bruno, not with my stomach growling like an angry bear. Get yourself round to the Sun Inn while there’s still time and bring back a dish of their beef stew, if they have it. And some pickled beetroot …”

  I was turning to go when a brusque rapping sounded at the front door. Harry and I froze, looking at each other.